I went to mass at a different parish this morning for Holy Day. My employer was courteous enough to give me a couple of hours off, and to make the day more convenient for them and my family, we went to the closest church and earliest mass we could find, which was not Holy Ghost, but a larger, suburban church. It was built within the last decade, and is constructed “in the round”, although there is some nice art and the tabernacle is behind the altar. Still, there is something a little distracting for me and my wife about attending Mass when there are people sitting directly across from you. It was also distracting singing the Marty Haas hymns. Still, the mass was edifying nonetheless. In the past several years, I haven’t attended the Mass celebrated entirely in English very many times, and today I found myself stumbling though some of the responses.

The Gospel today was the Beatitudes, which has got me thinking about money again. I’ve been thinking a lot about money and its relationship to God the past several months. It seems that everything I hear and read of scripture lately has been about money. It is strange that I’ve heard and read these same passages before, and I wasn’t really struck by thoughts about money, but lately I am. I think God wants me to do some serious meditation on money, so I think I’m going to use the space here on the bog to do that.

I’ll begin by saying that what struck me today was that in the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” (Vulgate “Beati mites quoniam ipsi possidebunt terram”) For the first time I was really struck by this phrase. Ordinarily most of my attention is captured by “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” but not today. Looking in the footnotes in the NAB (which is sometimes fraught with danger, but the concordance is almost always reliable), I was directed to Psalm 37:11, a good lead: “But the poor will possess the land, will delight in great prosperity.” (Vulgate “Mites autem hereditabunt terram et delectabuntur in multitudine pacis”)

So in the Latin it is “meek” in both places, not “poor” in the verse from the psalm (as in the NAB), although the poor do show up in other verses in this psalm; further, the Latin uses “inherit” in the Psalm, and “possess” in the Beatitudes—the NAB switched it. But this, though interesting, is not important.

What is interesting is the thought of the Earth or the Land. Now the NAB footnotes say that the referent here is to the Promised land, and this no doubt is true, however, I think there is a deeper reference here than Israel, and that is the land of Adam, Paradise. In Genesis, in both accounts, we see that there are two major divisions in creation, the heavens and the earth, the celestial world and the land. Now, everything on the earth came from the earth. We read in the second chapter of Genesis that the Lord not only brought forth all of the vegetation from the land, but also “the LORD God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air.” Adam alone is a mixture of the earth and the heavens, for surely the breath of God is celestial. Eve of course share this having come out of the Man. What is interesting is that Adam has dominion over all of the earth and the creatures of the land, the fish and the birds of the air. Adam posses the land in Paradise, he must be meek then, and poor as well. He has, only one thing that is really his, one thing that came out of him, and that is his wife. All else belongs rightly to the Creator. Perhaps there is something to learn hear about the nature of poverty, and certainly of poverty of spirit.

Another notable thing is that Adam is our father. What is his should rightly be our inheritance. So why don’t we have it? Psalm 37 suggests that it has been usurped by the wicked. The first line reads: “Do not be provoked by evildoers; do not envy those who do wrong.” The psalmist, David, speaks later in the psalm about the wicked drawing their weapons against the poor, and he also says, “Better the poverty of the just than the great wealth of the wicked.”

So there is something amiss here. In some way the wicked have disinherited us from the land we ought to possess in our meekness it should be our wealth and prosperity. What is also interesting here is the equivalence of land and wealth. This is an old and ancient equation. Land has often been the source of wealth. The only other source of wealth with a history is slavery. This makes a great deal of sense. The source of wealth should be something productive like land that can produce a yield on a regular basis. Land being the source of wealth also shows a connection to God’s creation. He is wealthy who has dominion over what God has created. There is something intuitive here.

But wealth is not like this any longer. Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in America is not a great land owner. That largest individual land owner in America is Ted Turner, who owns 1.8 million acres, worth $750 million. Of course Ted is worth $2 billion, so real estate, while a sizable portion of his wealth, doesn’t account for even half of it. Bill Gates is worth $51 billion, and owns less land than Turner. Wealth today is not about land, it is about money—dollars.

But what is money anyway? It is not land, and it does not seem to have much of a relationship to land either.